Daylighters (The Morganville Vampires #15)(55)
“Fallon’s quite busy trying to find out what Oliver knows about Amelie’s escape,” Myrnin said. He was sitting on the bed perusing a decades-old water-wrinkled magazine that apparently featured Princess Diana’s wedding on the cover. Probably the only reading material left at the Bitter Creek Mall, Claire guessed. “And what Oliver knows is absolutely nothing. He didn’t even know she’d escaped. So there’s nothing Fallon will learn from him.”
“He could kill him!”
“She’s right,” Jesse said from where she leaned against the wall, arms folded. “He could.”
“He won’t. He needs Oliver, especially if Amelie’s nowhere to be found. Oliver is the only authority he has left that everyone respects. He’s afraid enough of us now; if there’s no one we all follow, then it’s that much harder to keep us in line.” Myrnin shrugged. “And as long as we can hear him screaming, then he’s all right.”
Claire flinched, and looked from him to Jesse, who nodded soberly. “Best you can’t hear it,” she said.
“Help him!”
Myrnin moved, with that eerie vampire speed and grace, and before she could finish saying the two words, he was kneeling next to her, chin raised. “Then help me,” he said, and pointed to the collar. “Help me take this off!”
“No,” Jesse said, coming off the wall to stand next to Claire. “Myrnin, you’ll get her killed, and yourself along with her. You’ve seen how deadly these things can be if you tamper with them.”
“Wait,” Claire said. Her thoughts were racing, and she couldn’t understand what she was trying to think of until an image resolved in her mind, vivid and bloody and sharp. Amelie.
Amelie hadn’t been wearing a collar.
“I’m waiting,” Myrnin said, looking just barely patient.
“How did Amelie take hers off?”
“She didn’t,” he said. “I staked her dead so that she would not feel the burns as they activated the shock collar automatically when we went beyond the border. I only woke her up once we were well beyond the effective range, and then I set her loose. But I had no way to take it off without setting off the explosive.”
“She did,” Claire said. “She wasn’t wearing it when I saw her at the Glass House.”
“The Glass—” Myrnin looked utterly astounded. “She was supposed to go straight for the border, leave this town. Why in the world was she at the Glass House?”
“I think the more urgent question is how did she get the collar off by herself?” Jesse asked.
Myrnin nodded. “Claire, take a look at mine. See if there’s something we’ve missed.”
“Okay,” Claire said. He went to one knee, chin upraised and head tilted, and Claire bent over to study the latch. There wasn’t much to study, really. It was featureless, almost seamless, and there was a keyhole lock. The casing of the collar was hard black plastic. “I . . . don’t see anything that can help. Hold on . . . Do you mind if I . . . ?”
“Not at all,” he said, and rolled his eyes. “Which should be obvious to you after all this time, Claire.”
She hesitantly reached out and felt around the collar, looking for any hidden switches, catches, or other weird features that might have given her a clue. It felt smooth and regular, until she found a slightly rougher patch toward the back of the circle. She pressed harder, and felt it give.
A section of the collar’s plastic casing snapped out, exposing wiring and a green circuit board. Claire sucked in her breath and carefully, carefully turned the collar around to expose the rest.
She saw a blinking red light and a gray string of rubbery material that ran through the middle. She stared hard at it, and realized that the gray stuff was probably the explosive that the Daylighters had built into the collars. The stuff designed to remove a vampire’s head. Being this close to the compound was bad, and the smell of ozone and the faintly oily stench of it made her feel even worse, but she pushed that aside. Focus! The circuitry looked pretty straightforward at least, but as she reached in toward it, she saw the red light blink faster. Some kind of proximity alert, maybe a motion detector . . . She forced herself to freeze but not draw her hand back, then take in deep, even breaths as she watched the light.
It slowed down. Motion detector. Move too quickly, and it would activate. She didn’t know whether it would administer a shock—which, as Myrnin had said, would probably fry her brain—or whether it would just blow up, taking her hand with it. Either way, not an outcome she wanted.
It seemed to take forever, but she moved very slowly, pushing her fingertip forward a quarter inch at a time, waiting for the light to slow down, until her fingertip brushed the bottom of the circuit board. She traced the line of the motion detector’s wire to the processor, and spent another few seconds staring at the rest of the configuration to be certain she hadn’t missed anything. It looked like there was only one connection going to the explosive.
“I’m going to try something,” she told Myrnin. “It could go wrong.”
“More wrong than it already has?” he asked. “Do what you must. I won’t know if it explodes.”
That was a grim thought, but she took a breath, held it, and slowly, slowly inched her finger toward the wire. Then she edged it underneath, and gave it a quick, sharp tug to sever the connection.